[time_to_smile]

Anyone who spent considerable time in SF before the most recent tech boom would likely argue that it was the tech industry that caused the rot in the first place.

The foundation of safe cities is vibrant local communities with historic roots. Parts of the city where people choose to have and raise kids. Places with a sense of shared community where neighbors look out for each other.

The rapid influx of extremely high income individuals transformed SF over the course of the last decade. Uprooting those communities and replacing them with largely transient techworkers with no real interest in forming communities that don't help them to increase their TC and level up with their next new role.

Then when tech declines you really see the impact this has.

SF was treated as basically a luxury mall for rich tech workers to get whatever they want whenever they want. As tech workers start to leave it's no wonder the city feels like an abandoned mall.

[closeparen]

Xenophobic natives pursued an anti-housing strategy in order to thwart what they perceived as tech workers getting too much of what they wanted. It just didn’t work. Tech workers could still pay the inflated rents that you decided we should have in the service of “community.” But no one else could. Then you turn around and blame us for the collateral damage you caused with this narcissistic “look what you made me do” attitude.

Americans are entitled to move within the United States. Always have been, always will be. You can keep trying for de facto migration controls all you want, but you will never be able to dial them in to curate exactly the population you want. It will always blow up in your face like this. That’s very, very good and it makes me damn proud to be an American. This isn’t the feudal system. We don’t allocative the best land to the people born on it. It’s insane that this ever became a left-coded position.

[time_to_smile]

> Xenophobic natives

This claim isn't backed up by the demographic info of SF [0], and SF has historically been a very diverse, immigrant friendly city.

Percentage of US born (as well as specifically California born) residents of SF started to rise with the tech boom. The lowest number of US born residents of SF was 2000, it rose slightly by 2010 and continued to increase into 2020.

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_San_Francisco

[closeparen]

SF’s in-group is clearly not “white-bread American” but it absolutely has an in-group, an out-group, a sense of being overrun by the wrong kind of people, and a politics focused around defending its “original” territory, identity, and culture from the outsiders.

[time_to_smile]

You're just describing a "community" and the "shared values that define them".

So I think we agree: tech people came in, attempted to displace the local community and trampled on their values (and claimed them "xenophobic" for resisting).

And now that the tech community is withdrawing what's left is a broken city without the community and shared values that once defined it.

The tech community wanted SF to be a shopping mall for rich tech workers, some parts of the community resisted being turned into a shopping mall, they lost and now SF is rotten.

[closeparen]

US cities aren’t country clubs or coop buildings. You may think of yourselves as a “community” in some respects, but you aren’t entitled to require referrals, conduct culture fit interviews, or deliberate about whether to accept prospective members. The right to reside in the US is the right to reside in the US, and not just technically. This is good and important.

Trying to approximate these hukou-style controls through building permits is what created displacement - tech people just wanted places to live.

[triceratops]

Maybe SF should've tried approving more housing so rich techies didn't drive up rents and displace existing communities.

[alephnerd]

SF has definetly seen QoL drop like a stone, but how much of that is because techies now live in neighborhoods that used to be the ghettos until the early 2010s.

Like Hayes Valley used to be crack dens until Twitter money, Mission District was a Latino ghetto until FB money, and Portrero Hill and West Add were the African American projects. Plus Chinatown and Tenderloin had an active Triad and Vietnamese+Cambodian gang presence.

Now you see upper net worth people living in Hayes Valley, houses in Portrero go for millions, every new grad SWE getting a shithole studio within walking distance of DoLo Park, much of Polk St and northern Tenderloin is now classified as "Lower Nob Hill", and all the Triad members and Viet gangs got caught in the ICE dragnet or retired.

[augment001]

> Hayes Valley used to be crack dens until Twitter money, Mission District was a Latino ghetto until FB money, and Portrero Hill and West Add were the African American projects

I lived in Potrero hill and Hayes valley in the early 2000s and was no stranger to the mission.

Your comment is completely false.

[bitxbitxbitcoin]

The bubble that some people live in.